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New deputy leader of Islamic Coalition Party compares Ahmadinejad’s team to MEK

Mohammad Ali Amani, the newly appointed deputy leader of the Islamic Coalition Party has compared the “team” of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which includes such figures as Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei & Hamid Baqai, to the arch-nemesis of the Islamic of Republic, the exiled People’s Mojahedin of Iran. In the first half of the 1980s the Mojahedin and Khomeini’s followers took up arms against one another in a battle for the state, and the latter having lost the battle inside the country eventually joined forces with Saddam Hussein in the course of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war.

In the article published in Shoma, the Coalition’s official publication, Amani argues that the two groups have numerous similarities. For example, he alleges that while the Mojahedin instrumentally used Imam Ali’s well-known collection of sermons, the “Peak of Eloquence,” the “deviant current” use the Hidden Imam to further their political agenda.

Furthermore, he says, just as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the theocracy’s founder, declared that there is no position or office for the Mojahedin, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the current Supreme Leader has made it clear that there is no place in the Islamic Republic for the “deviant current.” But, he adds, “the language of both, disrupts the calm and promotes opposition to the Guardianship of the Jurist.”

In conclusion, Amani warns Ahmadinejad “to be careful of being misused by the deviant current.”

Maverick Principalist MP, Ali Motahhari, who defended the reform of the presidential electoral laws and has said that he believes it will be approved by the Guardian Council and be in effect for the next election.

Pictures: 33 young girls have been severely burnt as a result of an explosive gas leak in a school in Urumieh in Azerbaijan.

Foreign Affairs

Mehr News reports that Iraqi security services have uncovered a plan by Salafi militants to blow up the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf and assassinate Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Armaments have also allegedly been found, which have been linked to the plot in question.

Iranian MPs, 205 in all, have issued a statement thanking the Revolutionary Guards for their interception of an allegedly American drone which was said to have entered Iranian airspace.

Iran Newspaper, affiliated to the Ahmadinejad government, has published a report criticizing Majles Speaker, Ali Larijani’s 48 trips abroad in the last five years. It was also claimed these trips should be regarded as a “parallel foreign policy” and that the recent increase in Larijani’s trips abroad are connected to the approaching presidential election.

Mohammad Reza Rahimi, the first vice president of Iran, at the 11th session of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization told the audience: “The solution to Syria is only possible through obtaining a political agreement by means of dialogue between the opposition and the Syrian government.”

Majles Speaker Ali Larijani, speaking before the Majles today, claimed that “the dazzling triangle” of Iran, Hezbollah and the Palestinian resistance are a “compass for the changes in the Middle East and the axis of resistance against colonialism,” adding: “Now a new Middle East must be defined in the light of the crusading, pure, Mohammadan Islam.”